OxYgEn has asked for the
wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I've read the entire module installation tutorial on perlmonks, and I still can't figure out how to get it to install one, mostly due to my stupidity, i think.I have Windows XP Home and really I'm just messing around with PERL. I'm trying to install the Data::Serializer module. As was suggested in the tutorial, I downloaded CYGWIN(even though I can't stand BASH shells). Previously, I had used a program called ActivePerl to run my perl scripts. Here's what I did:

Downloaded the module to desktop from CPANOpened it with WinZip, and extracted it to C:\Perl\libOpened CYGWIN, changed to the directory, used perl makefile.plIt told me that it had successfully installed itI went to run my script(C:\test.pl) using ActivePerl, not CYGWIN, and I get the same error as when I had not installed the module. Here is the error if it helps:

As Roger said above, you could use ActiveState's ppm (Perl Package Manager) which is imho a better choice on win32 systems (since we are not used to building stuff on windows :) )
doing just ppm install Data::Serializer is not always the best choice since there can be available multiple versions on multiple servers.
so open a dos-box (start/run/cmd) and then start ppm
use the command search to look up the version, so type ppm search Data::Serializer (or help search for assistance)

Thank you very much, Roger. I didn't know about this command before. However, being as illiterate as I am with Windows(I had to make a reluctant switch from an Apple), I can't find out why it gives me this:

Opened CYGWIN, changed to the directory, used perl makefile.pl
It told me that it had successfully installed it

Urm... no, that's merely the first step. You still have to go through the make cycle. For Cygwin, use the make that comes with it. If you use ActivePerl or Indigoperl, you can use nmake, a free download (50k) from Microsoft.
Now the steps are, in the directory the decompressed archive is in:

perl Makefile.PL

creates the makefile

make or nmake

builds/moves the module files into their final form and tree structure organisation (under blib in the same directory)

make test or nmake test

runs the test scripts (common: *.t files under the directory t) while temporarily adding the directories under blib, namely blib/lib and blib/arch, to @INC. This is necessary because the module isn't installed yet.

make install or nmake install

copies the file trees under blib to its final location, normally that's under site/lib. This is the actual final installation.